man, I love A Link Between Worlds... sometimes I remember it, its hyper-competent yet humble design and storytelling proposal, and I genuinely think that makes it among my favorite Zelda games ;;

Made in 2023

If you've seen this anywhere else, I posted it back on my deviantArt when it was made.

Mario girls cosplaying as NPCs from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Sweeping Villager

2. Yellow Villager

3. Race Mini-Game Host

4. Sahasrahla's Wife

5. Blue Villager

also. i was going to ask this before but i didnt know how to word it: any zelda tropes you like/dislike? stuff like fairies being guides for link or the concept of sages/Legendary Sword or how link and zelda are always depicted or reoccurring characters like impa or beedle or epona. though theres probably not. a lot of tropes considering most games are vastly different from each other. uhh yeah if youve got nothing . things that were done from a zelda game that you liked?

OOH. tbh I had to think about this a bit (my gripes are usually with the fandom and how they depict the tropes as a Strict Narrative Rule) but! I do have some

UH ONES I HATE. this is gonna be long no matter what so it's going under a cut

Number one has got to be making link into a super special boy for basically no reason!!! being from a special type of knights is. so irrelevant to everything else about alttp link that I think a lot of people legitimately forget this. it barely ever comes up and it's honestly not that important to the story except as an excuse for why link's the only one that can grab the pendants and pull the master sword, which. why not just have him be the one to do this because he's just really determined? Ocarina of Time...tried this, sort of? almost completely irrelevant AGAIN. in twilight princess and wind waker they are just some guy basically and this is the best direction they could have gone with his character. except they ruined it in botw and ss and I will neverrrr forgive them for this. botw link beats up grown men at five years old he's like superbaby instant knight and I HATE it. it's just stupid. I don't even care that it applies pressure to him as a character and seems to affect him; they could have just made it an in-universe lie and it would have had the exact same effect so genuinely screw that trope

number two is calling random soldiers knights stop fucking doing this. i dont care that its fictional fantasyland it annoys me

number three! the 3D games' great fairies! I hate almost all of them the oot/mm great fairies are freaks, botw ones are so pretty but they're creepy as hell, and twilight princess is just a naked lady and it's stupid I hate her. wind waker minish cap and alttp fairies are gongeous though

number four. everyone thinking link is cool and or hot. I hate this in universe and in the fandom. I don't care that the devs wanted to make him """"cool"""" he's 100% always a LOSER!!!!

number five I hate the hijacked by ganon trope in zelda games so much. STOP ffs please let ganon/ganondorf take the spotlight we all love him. or let another villain be the main baddie

ok now for ones I like :)

nunberone...SENTIENT MONSTERS SENTIENT MONSTERS BABEY SENTIENT MOSNTERS ILVOE SRENTIERHSDJKFHSFHAAAAA

GRRAAA ITS A SECRET TO EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!!! MOE THE MOBLIN!!! KING BULBLIN SAYING HE FOLLOWS THE STRONGEST SIDE!!! THE ENTIRE DARK WORLD ITS SO

two. npc companions...rips off my shirt to reveal another shirt that says I LOVE MIDNA AND TATL AND EZLO AND KING OF RED LIONS AND GHOSTIE ZELDA AND MEDLI AND MAKAR AND TETRA AND SIDON AND YUNOBO AND

number three...I love random gods and spirits that are just hanging out because. keaton malanya zephos satori light spirits what have you. theyre great I need more of that.

number four incredibly weird npcs. need i say more

number five soldiers being extremely incompetent and dumb or getting possessed. soldiers as enemies or easily corruptible people

number six that one character that doesn't like link. you know what i mean (revali. groose. mido. iirc ralph? maybe? I haven't played much of the oracle games)

number seven hyrule with a dark and bloody past. and not only that but a fairly simple presentation of it that's clearly hiding a more complex underbelly. its just neat to see simple, clear-cut writing tell you so much with so little. it's a big reason I love alttp; it's simple but there's so much grief in it

number eight uh. clawshot/hookshot :] good stuff

Linktober 2023 – Masterlist

Day 1. Merchant (Ravio)

Day 2. Temple (ALttP Link exploring an old school dungeon)

Day 3. Friend/Helper/Companion (OoT Link and Epona)

Day 4. Sage (Nabooru)

Day 5. Race/Species (Midna and the Twili)

Day 6. Mask (Fierce Deity Link and all the masks!!)

Day 7. Sky Islands (TotK Link with the broken Master Sword)

Day 8. Constructs (Soldier Constructs)

Day 9. Deity (Hylia)

Day 10. Zelda (ALttP Zelda)

Day 11. Monsters (Dancing Redeads)

Day 12. Princess (Hilda)

Day 13. Spirit/Ghost/Phantom (Hero’s Shade)

Day 14. Ganon/Ganondorf (WW Ganondorf)

Day 15. Favorite character (Hero of Time)

Day 16. Dragons (all the dragons from TotK/BotW)

Day 17. Prophecy (Master Sword)

Day 18. Boss (WW Gohma)

Day 19. Zonai (TotK Zelda with the ghosts of Rauru and Sonia)

Day 20. Fire/Lava/Heat (Darunia)

Day 21. Link (TP Link)

Day 22. NPC (OoT Impa)

Day 23. Child/Children (OoT Link and Zelda as children)

Day 24. Korok/Kikwi/Kokiri (WW Link with Makar and Fado)

Day 25. Fairy (OoT/MM Great Fairy taking care of young Link)

Day 26. Overgrown (Minish Link)

Day 27. Plants/Forest (Saria)

Day 28. Light/Sparkle/Bright (OoT Rauru)

Day 29. Aquatic/Water (Ruto)

Day 30. Favorite game (Ocarina of Time)

Day 31. Free for all (OoT Zelink)

I’m also making posts grouping them by game or theme! In order of appearance:

A Link Between Worlds 

A Link to the Past

Ocarina of Time

OoT Seven Sages (six actually!)

Twilight Princess

Majora’s Mask

Tears of the Kingdom

Hylian religion

The Wind Waker

The Minish Cap

Hope you guys like them :D

These are available as prints on my Inprnt page! (I still need to add a few of them)

People. 50.6% of 87 votes are exactly 44 votes. And 49.4% is 43 votes. Tears of the Kingdom lost to Alttp for ONE VOTE

Anyway, I decided to yeet both off the poll! Let the 9th round begin! There are 8 games left, and these are really the best. I still have one game I want to vote but then the choice will be harder!

As I've written many things about totk but I don't want to give unwanted spoilers, this time the rankings are here and my opinions on the games are under the cut!

<< Previous round

The CDIs

Triforce Heroes

Zelda 2

Hyrule Warriors / Legends / Definitive

Cadence of Hyrule

Zelda 1

Four Swords Adventures

Four Swords

Oracle of Seasons/Ages

Age of Calamity

Phantom Hourglass

Link's awakening/LANS

Spirit Tracks

Tears of the Kingdom

A link to the Past

Soo! TotK and AlttP. I played AlttP shortly after BotW on nso, when TotK still wasn't out. I liked it a lot at first, but I have to say I didn't complete it. It was technologically advanced for that time for sure, but I don't think it aged well. The dungeons didn't leave me anything valuable to remember, like other games did, the items weren't equipped easily and the story was too simple and banal.

As for TotK. Oh TotK. I got to play botw another bit before returning it (I had borrowed it from a friend), after quitting alttp. And I still liked it! Then I bought TotK and at the beginning I was extremely surprised, it looked so great. I thought Rauru was the same first sage from OoT and he had a "goat disguise" to not be recognized, like his owl form. Of course I was wrong and then I was so disappointed, i left it almost one year ago and don't have any urge to play it again, I probably will though and give it another chance because something was really good like seeing grown up characters or finding those "Zeldas" or building things or finding amiibo costumes. - the story is great for a standalone game, but for zelda? The zonai make no sense to me and contradicted everything we knew. In the past right after sksw the gerudo weren't known, the zora and rito didn't exist, the gorons weren't on death mountain. They should have made another antagonist and not Ganondorf. Zelda's sacrifice was honestly a so great part, but the ending was awful. - the "dungeons" were copies of each other. And short and banal as heck, and the dialogues after each one were always the same. - People didn't remember Link. Only some of the major characters did but the majority of the npcs didn't know him. And Link didn't have the majority of his clothes. I know the outfits weren't mandatory to get in botw (nothing was mandatory tho) but at least the most known could have been left. The gerudo outfit, the climber set, the hylian set, the luminous stone set! They made up a story for the zora tunic and that's a good thing. - The depths were empty and too dark, even after the light roots were lighted. It was too easy to get lost. - the ultrahand and fuse mechanics are amazing as well as the ascend, but they should have made them mandatory at least for some parts of the game, to give them more spotlight. - I would have loved to have way more sksw references, this isn't a flaw of course but a personal preference! Also I would have loved to have Wolf Link as an ally again, instead of the spirits of the sages. - personal experience: the game crashed after I defeated Ganondorf for the last time. I was about to see the final cutscene when the screen went black and it never played (I saw it on youtube). Everything else on the swotch worked perfectly so it was just the game. Of course it doesn't autosave or let people save the game after entering the zone before the first fight with Ganondorf so I'm back there. I hated it.

ooo i’m here for another google doc essay thesis on all the zelda trans narratives <33 lol cited sources and everything (if you have time of course, i love reading all of your headcanons on loz)

god. okay this is every mainline game ive played (excluding sequels with the same characters) except skyward sword because i forgot about it at first and now im tired. here

oot/mm

Basically the entirety of oot is a super-intense wartime coming-of-age story, dealing specifically with the trauma of losing one’s childhood to war/being a child in wartime. Any coming-of-age can be easily analyzed through a trans lens imo, but oot lends itself particularly well to this reading.

For the first nine years of his life, link is told that he is a kokiri. He spends all of his childhood trying desperately to fit in with the kokiri, even though he and the kokiri he grows up with can tell that he is out of place somehow. When he leaves the forest and grows up, it clicks into place that he was never kokiri. And it HURTS. He was lied to. But he suddenly finds himself BELONGING for the first time, among hylians. One of the most impactful npcs in the series is, imo, malon, who link bonds with, feels connected to, and who GROWS UP just like him. She is a representation of everything link gains by leaving the forest. The chance to grow up, and the chance to be among people like himself and understand for the first time who he truly is. 

I don’t think i have to explain the subtext i'm getting at here. Replace kokiri with gender-at-birth and you have yourself a trans story. 

There are also, of course, points to be made about link’s lack of bodily autonomy throughout the story and his reclamation of it in mm. Link is, in the eyes of basically every adult in oot, a pawn to be used to win a war. He is something to be molded into the shape THEY need him to be. This is a common conflict in loz--the hero NEEDS to be the hero, and so he is given no room to define himself otherwise. 

Again. Do i have to explain the trans reading of this?? Adults who feel entitled to you for whatever reason refusing to let you define yourself in a way that doesn’t appeal to them, and viewing you as an object to be shaped into THEIR perfect image. Classic trans kid experience. 

Zelda i think is even more obvious because she literally physically transes her gender in the game. For no reason. A female ninja would have been fine. Female ninjas exist in this world. Impa is the obvious example. Zelda became a boy because he wanted to be a boy. This is factual, canonical story. I dont even NEED to go on but i WILL because i can.

The subtextual reading of trans zelda is even more fun imo. This is a kid who grew up functionally powerless. She KNEW ganon was going to destroy hyrule but she could not make adults hear her, and when things went wrong it was her fault. Sheik is, in many ways, a rejection of zelda. She does away with the ancestral name denoting wisdom because she was not wise enough to save her kingdom from ruin. he chooses sheik instead, a name derived from the historic guardians of hylia, and by extension hyrule. he reclaims the power he lost by, again, defining himself where he was never allowed to before. 

Personally i consider oot zel to be nonbinary and use she/he and the names sheik and zelda interchangeably. I really love the idea of a kid who grew up with so little control over anything in her life taking it all back and then deliberately fucking with some established rules anyway, just as a little show of power now that he has it. It’s what she deserves. 

Alttp

A LOT of my reading in this is totally rooted in subtext/analysis rather than actual canon material. If you haven’t read my analysis of alttp in my analysis doc i suggest you do bc some of that context may be needed to explain what i say here, since alttp is an older game so there’s much less actual canon characterization to go off of. 

There is a moment in this game, once you have gone through several dungeons and claimed the master sword and fought the secondary antagonist twice, where link is transported into the dark world. A mirror dimension in which his human form is distorted into a form that “reflects his inner self.” He looks into the mirror and he does not recognize the person looking back at him. 

The form he takes is a rabbit, which is, in my opinion, a reflection of his inner fear and the fact that he doesn’t want to be a hero. This link is a young boy who basically loses the only family he has and is then instantly thrown into the midst of a conflict he doesn’t fully understand. 

There are two points to be drawn from this. The first is the distorted self-image revealed in the dark world, which. The connection to transgenderism should probably be obvious from here. I’d say looking in the mirror and not quite recognizing yourself is a near-universal trans experience. 

The second is that, although this game is much less obvious about it, this link is in a very similar situation to oot link, in that he has been thrown into a conflict he doesn't understand and doesn’t really have any stake in, in order to be used as a pawn to win a war. (worth noting that if we follow the timeline, oot link has to DIE for this game to happen. They never fucking learn ig) so we have a repeat of the same situation in which link’s autonomy is taken from him by adults who want him to be a hero. Ive already explained the trans reading of this. You get the idea

Im skipping zelda in this one because it came out in 1991 so zelda is barely a character. Shes trans because i say so. Next 

Tp

Twilight princess did not do very well on a multitude of things. We all know how i feel. HOWEVER. There is something to be said for the fact that when link approaches people in wolf form they recoil in fear and disgust. And he canonically doesn’t expect this. It disturbs him. He KNOWS these people. He’s still the same person inside. Nothing has changed for him except the way he looks. But now no one will so much as look at him. 

To be quite honest. The wolf form was a bit of a thematic L in my opinion. I don’t think it had much narrative purpose and my best guess is that it was there to give tp a “brand-new fun gameplay” draw. But the fact that everyone is TERRIFIED of you was a good choice imo. I wish it had been followed through on thematically but I digress. There is transgenderism here. When you go back to your hometown and nothing has changed, as far as you’re concerned, but people avoid your eyes now. You haven’t changed, not really. You just look a little different. But the people either hate you or don’t recognize you now, and in some ways you’re glad, but in other ways you feel… alien.  

Zelda also isn’t a real character in this game but it doesn’t get an excuse because it came out in fucking 2006. We knew women were people by then guys come on. Anyways shes also trans because i say so. I dont feel like thinking about twilight princess any longer lol sorry

Ww

Im going to start with zelda/tetra here because i have a lot more to say about her lmao

Tetra is a wild, loud, stubborn, angry pirate. She is the exact opposite of what your average hylian might imagine a goddess-blood princess to be. She’s rude, she’s volatile, she looks out for herself and no one else. This is an image she has curated. But she is also kind. She lets link on her ship when he begs her to help him save his sister. she slips him a good-luck charm before he storms the fortress. She takes aryll home and never asks for payment. She is a pirate, but she does these things that seem so strangely… at odds with herself. I think a lot of her tough exterior is a curated image, for the benefit of her crew, yes, but also herself. If she is stubborn and loud and angry and unlikable then she is less likely to get hurt.  

Tetra learns who she is, and she is suddenly a new person, a different person. She’s zelda. And she’s so CONFUSED. She tries her hand at being a princess. She sits and waits patiently for her hero to come back to her. But in the end, she can’t even do THAT right. Things go wrong again, all because of her.

During the final battle of this game, zelda fights alongside you with the bow of light. I believe this was one of the first games in which she does this. 

This is a nonbinary narrative. Tetra tries so hard to fit into one box or the other, princess or pirate, but can never quite master either. During the final confrontation, though, she finds a happy medium. She is kind, wise zelda, in her regalia with her hair untied, but she is also stubborn, angry tetra drawing her bow to fight alongside link. She will not be defined. 

she/they tetra ftw lol. anyways

Wind waker link honestly has much less textual evidence for me than like. Any other link because imo wind waker is almost completely a clear-cut coming-of-age. It’s very easy to read (almost) any coming-of-age as a trans narrative but much less easy to actually explain that read. 

My stance kind of boils down to this: link has a clear-cut arc of growth in this story from a weak, inexperienced kid into a soldier who is capable of taking on ganon. This arc is kickstarted by him leaving home and no longer being confined by the limited perspectives of the people he grew up around. Unlike other links, this one doesn’t have too much pressure on him to be a hero. In fact, I would consider his growth into a hero to be framed very positively in this game as it gives him the agency he lacked at the beginning. This is an interesting departure from most other games in which link lacks a lot of agency. 

Basically, i think that while most other games can be read as kind of… tragic trans stories, about the struggles of not being allowed to define yourself, etc, wind waker link is the story of a kid who is finally GETTING to define himself. It’s more similar to Majora's mask in that way, in that this kid has already HAD the chapter where he’s confined to other people’s expectations and is now beginning to break out of it and reclaim his own identity. 

Botw

Jesus. God almighty. Okay

Like. not to keep beating a dead horse but this link is the most obviously negatively affected by the expectations and perceptions of those around him. He explicitly goes mute BECAUSE he knows people expect him to be a hero above all else, and it will be easier to conform to that expectation if he keeps quiet. This poor boy is so terrified to be imperfect, to be something that hyrule might not like, that he SHUTS DOWN. he is essentially nothing BUT what hyrule wanted him to be, because he never allowed himself to be anything else. 

I have already explained the trans read of this. Reread ocarina of time’s segment. Holy SHIT. he is so transgender. Also he’s 5’2 and has shoulder-length hair come on

Side note but i think botw is cool because it explores BOTH facets of the usual loz narrative (lack of agency/reclamation of agency) within the same game, while most other games go for one or the other. When link loses his memories he is FORCED to define himself, as he has nothing to go on anymore, which is a reclamation of the agency he had lost pre-calamity. Essentially pre-calamity is the oot segment and post-calamity is the mm segment of the narrative. It’s cool. Anyways

Zelda. GOD.

She is not the daughter her father wanted. She knows this. She tries SO HARD for SO LONG to be the daughter her father wanted. But she can’t. She will never be good enough in his eyes. Eventually she gives up on doing exactly what he wants. She hopes she can win his approval in other ways, with things she is good at. Things she CAN do right. But it’s never enough for him because all he sees is the daughter he wanted. The daughter she should have been. He doesn’t care that she can’t. He only cares that she Is Not. she knows she will never win his approval but she keeps trying anyway. 

Do i really need to explain this. Babygirl you are so trans gender

Linktober 2023

Days 21-30

I will be updating this post every day for the next ten days with each prompt!

Days 1-10

Days 11-20

Day 31

Linktober masterpost

----------

21. Link

Wold Link! I have never drawn a good wolf before, Used wolfie from lu as a ref

22. NPC

The cucco lady from ocarina of time! I can't believe i haven't included this game yet, i tried to kinda replicate the poly style of the game. I really wanted to draw a cucco

23. Child/Children

Wind waker Link and Aryll!

24. Korok/Kikwi/Kokiri

Ah the beautiful tradition of dropping rocks on the heads of koroks :)

25. Fairy

I mean who else would i have done?

26. Overgrown

I was going for specifically the master sword from ALTTP and used the design from the official art from that game

27. Plants/Forest

I couldnt think of anything other than the minish

28. Light/Sparkle/Bright

29. Aquatic/Water

I think of water and the sea and i think of Marin, i just love her so much (i snuck in a lil seagull there)

30. Favorite game

Skyward sword my beloved, such a great game, its annoying how much hate it gets because i love it. Here is the gate of time!

so I'm still not very far into TotK but i am noticing that there hasn't been any kind of specific reference to BotW

like yeah characters appear and there's vague nods to the Calamity and the characters already having been established as knowing Link however

there's nothing overtly direct and specific so far, which can come off as a bit odd given everything, and in a sequel usually you'd expect directly referenced follow ups, right?

but here's the thing, Zelda games rarely have direct sequels following the same characters (most of the time we're following a different iteration of Link and Zelda and a revolving cast of NPCs), and when they do, for the most part they're not set in the same location (Phantom Hourglass (sequel to Wind Waker) is in the Realm of the Ocean King instead of the Great Sea, the Oracle games (sequels to ALttP) are set in Holodrum and Labrynna, Link's Awakening is set on Kolohint Island (also a sequel to ALttP, technically also a sequel to the Oracle games), Majora's Mask (sequel to Ocarina of Time) is set in Termina)

and because of that, it makes sense that events from previous games aren't directly mentioned - new location, that stuff isn't particularly relevant, right?

but that's the underlying core of it - every Zelda game is presented in a way that it could be someone's first Zelda game. you don't need the context of the previous game to be able to jump in on this one, so they go along without referencing things directly, simply in a world building manner, so people jumping in on the newest game don't have to go through the previous one to understand what's going on

hmm.. what's your favorite loz headcanon? :)

Ooooo!

My all time favorite LoZ headcanon is that Link was just born with pink hair in ALTTP

Just kind of like how we sometimes have albinoism in our modern-day world, I kind of headcanon that hylians just are born with pink hair sometimes. This kind of solidifies the fact there are also two npcs in totk with pink hair, with one of them actually having pink skin as well

Also I completely forgot there's also the one Gerudo with pink hair and paler skin who could also be an albino in gerudo culture, so I suppose it is possible! (though it could be the mixing of Hylian genes; I am not certain)

Something funny I thought about in relation to the Player Au is some of the crazy shenanigans the games let you pull and what that would be like for the characters actually experiencing them. Especially when you stop to consider that the games don’t really show Link’s and/or assorted NPCs reactions to various things. Let’s count them off by game, yes?

  * The Original (which I have actually played! Retro-gaming ftw!); you can bomb walls and floors to find secret places that hold everything from shops to fairies to a random moblin who gives you rupees for no apparent reason (I, the player, was confused by that last one. I can only imagine what Hyrule’s reaction must’ve been). You can also accidentally bomb your way into the wrong cave and be charged for “door repairs” by the old man inside it

  * ALTTP; you can buy a bee of all things from a red shield shop in the dark world. Not even the shopkeeper knows why that’s there. And then of course there’s one quest in the game where you have to drag a damned chest across the country only to be given an empty bottle as payment.

  * The Oracle games; bump into Maple enough time in either game and she eventually switches out her broom for a vacuum and in a linked game that gets traded in for a flying saucer! (What the hell Maple?! Where’d you even get those from?!).

In Seasons if you set the weather to winter and go into a normally inaccessible house, there’s a green-haired girl named Holly who says, and I quote, “Hey, you're not Santa!”.

There’s a chest with a single rupee! (Link and Player both would prob be deadpanning and going “are you kidding me...”).

There’s this funny little end-game credits skit in a non-Linked run of Ages where Link tries to teach Ralph how to perform a Spin Attack, and Ralph ends up accidentally doing the Hurricane Spin instead before collapsing from dizziness.

  * Four Swords; you can pick up the pots and throw them, and not just at monsters or to break them but also at the other Links! Which then causes the pot to get stuck on their head for a while as everything goes completely black save the character sprite. Which made this hilarious image pop into my head of one of the colors picking up a pot to throw it at some monster only to completely miss and hit one of the other colors instead. (I’m still not sure which combo is funnier, Blue hitting either Green or Vio, or Vio misjudging his aim and hitting Blue!)

  * Pretty much everything you can do in BoTW. Full stop.

  * Wind Waker; attacking a moblin from behind or using the grappling hook on them nets you some pretty funny animations. The grappling hook is especially so because you actually steal the moblin’s necklace and it’ll actually stare at you for a moment at the audacity.

You can steal a Stalfos’s mace while it’s in pieces and when it reforms it’ll realize what’s missing and try to use one of its own arms as nunchucks.

Drop a bomb into an area with a bunch of moblins and the idiots will attack it, with predictable results.

Drop another and they'll run away panicking!

  * In both BoTW and Wind Waker you can make certain monsters to engage in friendly fire against each other and eventually they’ll start attacking their allies instead of Link in revenge.

  * OoT and Majora’s Mask let you have a bit of fun with the masks. Using the Captain's Hat and the Bremen mask during King of Ikana boss fight is a hoot. (On a slightly unrelated note, the verses books strategy guide for Majora’s Mask is just a riot!)

The fact that in both games you can find cows where they have no business being with no explanation.

  * In nearly every game you can beat nearly every boss (including the big bad!) with either the fishing pole or the bug net!

  * Minish Cap; you can use the Cane of Pacci on nearly everything, including Vaati! Just imagine for a moment what that must look like from an in-game perspective. Throughout the entire final fight, Vaati keeps getting flipped upside-down by this kid who’s probably trying not to break down laughing in the middle of fighting. Player is laughing themselves to tears and is likely the reason Link is having a hard time keeping it together.

Every time you activate a warp marker it explodes for absolutely no reason!

Using the gust jar on a Stalfos will yank its skull off, leaving it to wander around blindly. Even funnier is if there are any pots nearby it’ll try to use that as a replacement, which naturally goes about as well as you’d expect.

  * Hitting the Sheikah Stones in Skyward Sword, Majora’s Mask, and Ocarina of Time all have some comical effects, most commonly being rocketing up and then crashing back down like a badly piloted toy helicopter!

  * Tri Force Heroes; the utter chaos that frequently occurs during co-op. I need not say more.

----------

I won't lie to you, pixie, this post was one hell of a rollacoaster to read but being the daredevil I am I enjoyed every second of it.

I can only begin to imagine half the stuff Guide! Player had probably coaxed the boys into. Some instances leading in happiness, some in confusion and others with said hero with a few or more scraps or possibly being chased. They're a menace, they know it, and they have to use that opportunity to bully those boys (and try and bring smiles to their faces during their darkest hour.)

Ok random question because I haven’t played a lot of the 2D Zeldas.

Which Zelda games have references to the Golden Goddesses (Din, Farore, and Nayru)?

So far I have

None in Zelda 1 or 2

ALttP: image of the triforce being created

LA: nothing

OoT: creation cutscene

MM: Nothing

OoX: the oracles themselves

FS: Nothing

WW: beginning scroll mention of them flooding the ocean

FSA: Nothing

MC: NPCs named after the goddesses but they’re just normal people

TP: shown sealing the twilight realm after the interloper war

PH: Nothing

ST: Nothing

Skord: the three dragons

ALBW: Nothing

TFH: Nothing

BotW: Dragons

TotK: Dragons

Most of the games I have nothing written for are also games that I have not played. If anyone knows about appearances of the goddeses in any of the games I didn’t mention, please let me know!

Your top-down Zelda post made me think about how cool it would be if we got a modern reimagining of the two NES Zelda games. Especially since they were originally designed in an era where reading the instruction manual was highly recommended, if not mandatory, and secrets were found by exchanging tips with friends and calling Nintendo for help lol. So it would be cool if the original Zelda and Zelda II the Adventure of Link were updated and refined in a similar vein that Metroid Zero Mission did for the original Metroid. What are your thoughts on that?

I just recently watched a video where a guy was talking about how the original NES TLoZ gives you no direction whatsoever to a degree that's overwhelming, and I was sitting there the whole time like "Yeah, it came with a full map of the overworld and the manual included a step-by-step guide on how to travel to the first dungeon and then complete the entire damn thing." People who play it today on Switch Online don't even know how much we DON'T get to help us.

It's honestly surprising that your suggestion hasn't happened already, y'know? They made the NES Mario games more accessible with Super Mario All-Stars in the SNES era, giving them save features that they (especially 3 and Lost Levels) desperately needed. They gave us Zero Mission as a more accessible Metroid remake that had a friggin' map functionality. They even did the Kid Icarus "3D Classics" release on 3DS that added saves (and some cool backgrounds) that made the original easier by tweaking a few key details - Pit's arrows fly farther, extra life bars fill up as soon they're obtained, Reapers no longer pursue when attacked, etc.

And they even STARTED to do this for the first game at one point! The two "Oracle" games began life as Nintendo commissioning Capcom to remake the original Legend of Zelda with Link's Awakening-style sprites, providing full 8-directional movement and spin attack and more NPCs to give hints and direction + other ALttP-style enhancements. But Capcom's "enhancement" ideas gradually grew so much that they asked to shift focus and got the go-ahead to make a whole trilogy of new games instead. (Which later got downgraded to two new games.)

Heck, they even had a graphically updated version of Zelda 1 on the Satellaview service for the SNES... even if it did require you to be connected online to progress at specific times. And it had no other changes. :P

It just seems like such an easy-money decision. And they've clearly considered it and/or made half-steps towards doing it on more than one occasion. And Link's Awakening remake has sold over 6 million copies now... so YEAH.

They really need to pull the trigger on this... especially for Zelda II. It needs punching up more than any other title in the series, frankly. Hell, even just removing the limited-lives system would be a GIGANTIC improvement to it!

Today, I beat Willow. A Capcom made game loosely based on a movie of the same name. Capcom has a pretty good track record with licensed games on the NES, right? So how did they do this time?

Well, I'd call it "decent" but not their best. It's trying to be Zelda, and it does some things pretty well. Willow controls great, kind of like ALTTP Link, he can move diagonal and he can slash. He can thrust as well, which is useful for enemies with shields.

But the level design is kind of weak. It's more linear than Zelda but that doesn't mean you won't get lost both in and out of dungeons, and they give you no form of map to make up for this. There's a lot of wasted space in the overworld that could have been used for landmarks to assist navigation.

Another issue is that though there is very little backtracking involved, there's still some backtracking, except in some instances there's no clues that I could find that told me I need to backtrack to speak to certain NPCs, and when I did know of an NPC I was meant to backtrack too, they just relocated for no reason.

I think my biggest problem is that you lose all your EXP and some progress if you die, and that can be very crushing when you're closer to the higher levels, because enemies do not offer very high exp... and you do need to be at least two levels away from max to beat the final boss, as they can only be damaged with an MP consuming item that can run out of MP with no way to replenish it.

But it's still a very competently made game with great presentation, graphics, music, the little character interactions. I still had a good time with the game despite the flaws... it just aint gonna be one of the games I come back much to when Zelda is an option on the NES.

As for representing the source material, I don't see why this game had to be based on Willow, like there are a few connections to the movie but most of them are loose, there's a lot of original characters, events don't happen the same, Willow travels alone and carries a sword and shield for combat, the baby plays a very minor role, I don't even know if Willow was all that popular, I grew up around that time and my family were suckers for fantasy movies that Willow was cut from the cloth, but I never even heard of this movie until a few years ago when I was investigating the NES library... I guess it must have some fans though because just yesterday when looking into this game I found they're making a series out of it. Go figure, So I think fans of the movie might enjoy it if they can look at it as a "what if" scenario and don't mind how it deviates from the movie.

Do I reccomend it to the average player? If you like Zelda on the NES, or maybe even a Link to the Past, it's not even close to as good as those games, but you might get something out of it. That's my answer.

Sorry for my handwriting.(I associate you with mia fey because....well it’s pretty obvious.i associated you with alttp link because of your stawberry blonde animatic (or you never did a sb animatic and you and their style is just stupidly similar.and i confused you with another person here,i just remember i liked their oracle link design,i i had to do a second say in number three...it’d be any digimon npc even though i dont play digimon)

haha these are all perfect!!! <3